A Whiteheadian Approach to Self Efficacy and Creative Confidence in Electrical Engineering

Abstract

1. Introduction A technical university should educate engineers who are competent in their scientific discipline and confident in their own ability to fill important engineering roles [1]. One critical factor in gaining competency and confidence is that students have the opportunity to experience mastery during their education, as these mastery experiences will help them to develop self efficacy [2,3], as well as creative confidence [4]. Self-efficacy is defined by Bandura [1] as a personal judgement of "how well one can execute courses of action required to deal with prospective situations", and is affected by the following four factors: 1. Experiences of mastery 2. Vicarious experiences ("if they can do it, so can I") 3. Social persuasion 4. Psychological factors. Of these four factors, experience of mastery is identified as the main one, and this is the one we have been focusing on in our study. In a modern engineering education program, a multitude of subgoals and courses are involved. A successful education program depends on a sound structuring of objectives and learning activities. In the following we describe how A. N. Whitehead's ideas on learning can be applied to a five year integrated master program in Electronic System Design and how an application of these ideas can foster the mastery experiences needed for the development of self efficacy and design confidence. Methods and results are discussed based on three types of student survey.